Leighla Whipper

During her later years, Whipper lived in the Hudson River Valley and enjoyed playing piano, writing, painting, and crocheting. She died in an accident at her Kingston, New York on May 2, 2008.

Leighla authored several mystery stories and novels. In 2003, Writer's Club Press published (under the name Lelia Frances Whipper) a memoir entitled The Pretty Way Home.

In 1950, Whipper remarried to restaurateur Norman Ford. They remained together until Ford's death in 1961.

From 1949 to 1986, Leighla co-owned, with her mother, the Spuyten Duyvil, a restaurant in Saratoga Springs popular with the horse racing crowd.

Whipper also wrote songs featured in Soundies produced for black audiences by African American football pioneer Frederick "Fritz" Douglas Pollard and his Suntan Studios on 125th Street. She worked with Trinidadian calypso musician Lionel Belasco to arrange and copyright, through the Tin Pan Alley music publishing industry, tunes Belasco had heard circulating freely in the islands during his youth. Together, Belasco and Whipper published Calypso Rhythm Songs: Authentic Tropical Novelty Melodies in 1944.

Whipper married sociologist Hylan Garnet Lewis in 1935. The couple had one child, daughter Carole, though Hylan's obituary states they had one son and one daughter. The family separated after Lewis made a solitary move to Chicago to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. Though the family later reunited in Alabama for a short time, the couple divorced in 1943. After the divorce, Leighla and Carole went back and forth between Washington D.C., where Ionia lived, and New York, where Leighla's mother, Virginia, resided.

Whipper graduated from Howard University where she participated in a literary association called the Stylus Club. She was elected Scribe of the Stylus Society during the 1933–1934 academic year.

Leighla Frances Whipper (September 22, 1913 – May 2, 2008) was an African American songwriter, journalist, mystery writer, and businesswoman. She is best known for arranging and publishing musical scores of calypso and Afro-Caribbean songs, often with collaborator Lionel Belasco.

Leighla Frances Whipper was born September 22, 1913 in Athens, Georgia. Her father, Leigh Whipper, was a stage and Hollywood screen actor, who hailed from a prominent literary and social activist family. Leighla's paternal grandmother, Frances Anne Rollin, wrote the first diary of a Southern black woman published as well as the first full-length biography authored by an African American.